Artist’s illustration of two merging neutron stars. The narrow beams represent the gamma-ray burst while the rippling space-time grid indicates the isotropic gravitational waves that characterize the merger. Swirling clouds of material ejected from the merging stars are a possible source of the light that was seen at lower…
The Milky Way as seen over the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile and the 4-meter Victor M. Blanco Telescope, home to the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera and some of history’s first images of a binary neutron star merger, taken by Texas A&M University astronomer Jennifer Marshall. (Matt Dieterich)…